Change
I genuinely fear for my future self. Upon been given the task to once again reflect on myself as a person, I looked through my old essays and the words in general that my brain has churned out over the last five years of my life and I came to the somewhat sobering conclusion that I have not changed. Obviously this is not true in the physical sense, as I can now run a mile without going into cardiac arrest and am seldom called “marshmallow boy” anymore—but I have noticed that in many senses, my brain has not “grown up” and I’m very afraid that maybe it never will. Without making any bad Peter Pan jokes I would like to point out that by saying my mind hasn’t grown up I’m not talking solely about the fact that it’s still a tremendous mental effort to restrain myself from laughing when “bosom” is mentioned in Shakespeare, but I instead refer to the ridiculously juvenile I deal with things in my mind and by extension reality. Throughout this essay I will go through the separate parts of my life that my child-brain damages and even some that it helps. By the end of this essay I will come to a somewhat unavailing conclusion on how my problem will affect the rest of my life if it persists.
One part of my mind that has remained relatively untouched is my imagination. It is pretty much guaranteed that if the thirteen year old version of myself were doing this essay, he too would be distracted by the possibilities of having invisibility powers. My imagination causes me an incalculable amount of mischief, and because quite a large part of my personality is made up of paranoia, my imagination likes to make friends with my paranoia and cause me all sorts of made up problems. These problems range anywhere from thinking I have malaria to making up the unlikely scenario that my postman is plotting against me and hiding my mail because my hair is blonder than his. On the bright side, this part of my personality is fantastically inconsistent so sometimes I get a break from it long enough to start trust someone, only for it to come back right on queue and ruin everything. Good times. I can only hope I somehow outgrow this, because there are no redeeming qualities of this condition.
Something I always thought was wonderful about children is their ability, or more accurately, disability to grasp the extreme pertinence of some situations that they are in. They just carry on, unworried. I share this disability to some extent, although by no means would I describe it as wonderful. By this I mean I seem to ignore things in my life that actually matter, and get worried about things that have no real degree of importance in reality. This essay is a perfect example, as only now, days away from its due date, have I realised the importance. Needless to say this is terrible and will no doubt affect me badly but I’m glad to say there is a silver lining to not caring about some things. A few months ago my auntie passed away from widespread cancer. Naturally, my family did not respond well. There were many tears and no small amount of anger. But when it came to me; I felt nothing. I loved my auntie and talked to her quite a lot but I was simply not upset by her death. I didn’t have to go through the painful mourning and sleepless nights that the rest of my family endured, and for this I am confused, but partly thankful for my dysfunctional brain.
Too many times has my childish sense of humour gotten me into trouble and I’m sure all the teachers I’ve ever had could not agree more. I have been in high school for five years and I have still not